A lawyer was standing in line at the grocery store when a guy tapped him on the shoulder.

“I recognize you,” the guy said. “You’re a famous lawyer. I’ve seen you on TV.”

Oh god, the lawyer thought. Not again.

“I hate lawyers,” the guy continued. “They help murderers go free. They sue companies and put people out of work. They lie through their teeth just so that they can win their cases. The world would be better off without them, I say. What good have you ever done, lawyer?”

“Well,” said the lawyer thoughtfully. “I’m the one that got Rebecca Black’s song Friday pulled off YouTube.”

“That was you?” the guy said, warming up. “I hate that song worse than I hate lawyers.”

“Yes,” the lawyer said proudly. “I’m the one that set up the copywrite dispute in the first place. I can’t promise anything, but I’m trying to make the legal dispute so acrimonious that the song will be banned forever.”

“Now that’s what I call good lawyering,” the guy said. He called over a bunch of other people in the store, and they shook the lawyer’s hand, and they thanked him for his good work. They also wished him luck in getting the song Friday banned from the airwaves forever.

As the lawyer was leaving the grocery store, another guy ran up beside him and said, “I know who you really are, and you didn’t have anything to do with getting Friday off YouTube”

The lawyer stopped, dreading what was about to happen.

The new guy continued. “You’re John Edwards, the former presidential candidate, the lawyer who just got indicted for using campaign money to pay off a mistress.”

“Allegedly,” John Edwards said. “I can’t talk about the case, you know.”

“That man in the store recognized you because your mug shot was all over the news last week,” the guy said. “And you were smiling. That’s kind of creepy, smiling during a mug shot.”

John Edwards stood and said nothing in response, so the guy kept talking.

“You’d just been indicted, your ex-wife left you nothing in her will, your life savings is almost gone, everybody hates you, you might have to spend years and years in prison. What the heck were you smiling about?”

John Edwards thought back for a moment, remembered, and then said, “I had just heard, Rebecca Black’s song Friday was just pulled from YouTube.”